Notes on the nomenclature, characteristics, status, and biology of Field Thesium, Thésium des Champs (<i>Thesium ramosum</i> Hayne; Thesiaceae/Santalaceae), a potentially serious invasive plant in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Field Thesium (Thesium ramosum Hayne; Thesiaceae/Santalaceae) is an alien species in Canada, previously misidentified as Thesium arvense Horvátovszky or Flaxleaf (Thesium linophyllon L.). It is a hemiparasitic herb characterized by its many 25–50 cm long aerial stems that grow indeterminately from a caudex. Its narrow leaves extend along each aerial stem from their base into the paniculate inflorescence. The flowers are white, 4–5 mm wide, with five corolla lobes; they are perfect and occur singly, subtended by a three-parted bract at the tip of a narrow pedicel, with 60–90 such flowers along each inflorescence. Its roots develop profuse haustoria that attach to host plant roots. Thesium ramosum is compared to the related native genera, Comandra and Geocaulon (placed in Comandraceae or Santalaceae), which share features but differ by having determinate growth and being unbranched. Thesium ramosum is widespread from western Europe to western China, but in North America it is known from only three western states and Alberta, where it has established in Fish Creek Provincial Park and elsewhere in Calgary. Worldwide, many species in the genus Thesium are notable invasives and T. ramosum has the potential to be a high risk invasive in North America. Observations in the park show that it can spread rapidly and parasitize many host species. It does not have federal or provincial control status in Canada, but because it is parasitic and has potential to become widespread, it is regulated in the USA by the United States Department of Agriculture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".